1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to information sharing and management technology. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for promoting information or knowledge sharing among users registered to a computer network by allowing an information or knowledge owner to locate or directly access private information, to publish information for direct access by information or knowledge requestors, or to broker information or knowledge with an information or knowledge requester. This invention also relates to a system and method which allow an organization to develop and manage a reward system based on the frequency of an information or knowledge owner's contribution to information or knowledge sharing and the frequency of an information or knowledge requestor's use of shared knowledge.
2. Related Art
A statement as to the general structure of knowledge sharing and management systems can summarize the problem with such systems today. These systems are generally designed to “manage” knowledge rather than dynamically share it. As such, these systems are often called “knowledge management systems” and are built to manage a body of information that is collected from individuals within a group or organization. In most cases, the group or organization has some shared domain of responsibility or expertise. The management of the knowledge is generally focused around the central body of information. Software and business processes have been designed to facilitate the posting of information or knowledge objects in digital format to and retrieval from the central body of information, or central knowledge repository. Both the posting and retrieval of information have benefited by the association of descriptive contextual information, or meta-data, about the data stored in such a system. In addition, the security of and appropriate access to the information have benefited from software and business practices designed to manage rules, roles, and access privileges. The use of Internet technologies has enhanced the share-ability of digitized knowledge by collapsing barriers of time and geography.
The premise that brought about these types of centralized knowledge management systems is that some people are knowledge creators (or “knowledge leaders” or “knowledge owners” or “expertise providers”) and have information that would be useful one or more times to other potential users (“knowledge seekers” or “knowledge requesters”) of the information who could be granted access to the information. I call this the “big bucket approach”. As illustrated in FIG. 1A, the big bucket approach assumes that users who voluntarily contribute their knowledge or information content to the big bucket can also retrieve information from the bucket. Essentially, information is obtained either directly or indirectly from the knowledge creators and stored in the central knowledge repository for the knowledge seekers to locate and utilize in the ordinary course of creating work products. The primary objectives for these systems are to have the most relevant and most current information available at all times. A variety of incentive compensation systems have been incorporated along with this approach to encourage the ongoing and continuous population and maintenance of the knowledge repository so that the big bucket is full of imminently locatable, useful information.
Systems utilizing the population and updating of the information en mass (“top down”) from central sources such as fileservers, Web pages, etc. or individually by capturing data at the point of origination or utilization (“bottom up”), such as within email systems or in local end-user computer files have been designed.
Similar to the Marxist-Leninist social system, which did not work, big bucket information communism doesn't work well either. The problem with systems employing the big bucket approach is that they do not effectively take into account the human bias not to share information outside of the context of a trust-based relationship. The reality with such systems, as illustrated in FIG. 1B, is that the central bucket is empty relative to the actual digital information that is maintained or possessed directly by the knowledge creators. Extending the bucket metaphor, one can say that the reality is that the distributed individual buckets populated and maintained by individual knowledge owners is where the bulk of actual knowledge desired for a sharing system resides.
What is desired is a multi-domain framework that takes into account, facilitates, and maximizes the access and sharing of knowledge within the context of a trust-based relationship.
What is further desired is an incentive mechanism incorporated with the multi-domain framework to encourage the users to share their work products or other knowledge objects in their possession.
What is further desired is a security mechanism incorporated with the multi-domain framework to ensure privacy and to promote knowledge access and sharing within the context of a trust-based relationship.
What is further desired is an instant message platform incorporated with the multi-domain framework to enable a knowledge owner to provide a knowledge requestor with advice, comments, and substitution of requested resource in a real time manner.